Introduction and onboarding content
View All TagsIf you're using Cursor (and honestly, why wouldn't you be), you've probably heard about MCP. It's how you give Claude access to your databases, APIs, and tools right inside the editor.
Here's how to actually set it up.
My first MCP server took three hours to get working because I made every possible mistake: no logging, broke stdio with print statements, forgot to restart Claude Desktop, and wondered why nothing worked. Your first one should take 30 minutes.
This is what actually works, with the debugging steps I wish I'd known upfront.
For the first month or two of building agents on Claude, I spent most of my debugging time staring at hallucinated API endpoints. The model would confidently POST to URLs that didn't exist, invent function names, and produce JSON that wouldn't parse. Switching the integration over to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) didn't fix everything, but it removed the entire class of "the model made up an endpoint" failures, which were the bulk of what we were chasing.
The rest of this post is the explanation I wish I'd had on day one.
